On March 16, 2011, the Los Angeles Times published a column one front page profile on Cristian Gheorghiu/Smear chronicling his rise from scrawling his name on the streets of the city to being an art world habituée. "The government shouldn't be in a position of saying you can't make art from certain materials". "It raises extreme 1st Amendment issues, " said Peter Bibring, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, who is representing Gheorghiu. One of the provisions sought would prevent Gheorghiu from using his graffiti name "Smear" in his art work. The suit had asked for $5,000,000 in restitution from the 11 defendants and was seeking a first-of-its-kind injunction against a graffiti crew, an injunction modeled on those made for violent street gangs. city attorney filed a civil lawsuit against 11 alleged members or alleged former members of the MTA crew, Gheorghiu being named in that lawsuit as one of the alleged members or former members of the crew. Following that 2009 sweep, Gheorghiu/Smear spent about a week in jail, but charges against him were never filed. Members of that MTA crew were accused of perpetrating a quarter-mile long graffiti which is claimed by many to have been the largest single work of graffiti in the world. In February 2009 Gheorghiu was arrested again mistakenly in a sweep aimed at a tagging crew that calls themselves the Metro Transit Assassins (MTA), a crew Smear was suspected of having once been a part of. A graffiti vandalism conviction resulted in a 40-month suspended prison sentence, three years' probation, and about $28,000 in restitution for tagging on buses. In February 2007, Cristian Gheorghiu "Smear" was arrested for alleged graffiti on LACMTA buses. In 2006 he began exhibiting/displaying in Los Angeles galleries some of the original art works that he had created, which were in the form of paintings (on canvas and on woodpanels) and drawings, including collage and other media. Marc Ecko's Complex Magazine put Smear at number 14 on their list of "The 50 Biggest Street Art Arrests" of all time. Among Smear's most famous street art images are his "Liquor Face" character (which momentarily appears in DreamWorks Pictures' animated film Bee Movie), and another image which is a shadowy depiction of Smear's own face, with "Smear" written underneath. Smear's uncomplicated style used a spontaneous repertoire of images, designs and slogans. As a graffiti artist, Smear was further distinguished from the others by his uncomplicated graffiti writing style, unlike the intricate wildstyle works which are commonly a part of graffiti art. scene rarely ventured into the forms popularized by Smear. Graffiti practitioners at the time in the L.A. Before Smear, street art and graffiti art were considered separate communities. He was one of the first Los Angeles street artists to use street art methods in his graffiti. Smear has been influential in the Los Angeles graffiti scene since the late 1990s.
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